Prior to reading Robyn Williams’ latest book, I dipped into one of the racier tomes on Intelligent Design/Creation Science.

It confirmed that the only science in Creation Science is that which it tries, often petulantly, to disprove. All the bits I read went to work on Darwin, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins with relish, claiming that evolution couldn’t possibly be right and offering faith as an alternative.

So, instead of battling rafts of compelling claims proposing an alternative scientific basis for our being, Williams is required only to peer into some of the complexities of nature and let the reader go away and muse on it.

OK then, job done?

Not quite. I’m at a loss to know for whom Unintelligent Design is written. Williams describes the book as “more of a primer than a text”, and he quotes from many of the better books on his subject, yet there is neither bibliography nor index.

The writing, too, while deft, witty and thoroughly absorbing if you’re among the converted, might not be quite so appealing to the waverer — describing Scientology as “convoluted claptrap”, for example, might be heartfelt but is hardly helpful. There are factual errors — the famous geneticist is Craig Venter, not Ventor, and helium does not have a “molecular weight of two”.

These criticisms should not cloud the central issue, however, which is that while Intelligent Design is fine as religion, it is pernicious and misleading when represented to us as science.